Stage fog is a delicate creature: whether as haze that hangs in the air, a thicker vapor, or the low-lying kind that the lighting designer Natasha Katz calls “Brigadoon” fog — the stuff that wafts like a cloud around the actors’ ankles when it’s kept really cold, and rises higher when it’s not.
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Fog is used in most productions whether you notice it or not. Sometimes there is just a little bit of haze so you cannot really tell, while sometimes there are blasts of fog and it is very visible and intentional. At Carnegie Mellon we love using fog in all of our shows. Fog makes the lighting look cool because you can see the light beams in the air. That may not always be the effect you are going for and the room can look very cloudy. Fog is very tricky because it has a mind of its own and looks differently almost every time you use it. It can be very distracting if there are clouds of smoke in the air and the audience cannot see the stage that well and if they are coughing in the audience because of the fog. Most audience members probably do not know that most fog is safe to breathe in in small amounts so they will believe that they cannot actually breathe when the room is filled with fog.
This article hits far too close to home as a lighting designer and a SFX technician in the making. Having to contend with the HVAC system during 2 of my 3 playground pieces was the hardest part of the festival, and the struggle continued during Dance/Light, which involved me manually controlling the haze in each piece. It took me a full week and a half of rehearsal to get to the point where I felt like the haze even had a chance. The fact that we need to accomodate for these air systems in each performance is hard to come to grips with, as the moments before the theatre is filled with haze are often filled with distracting, scattershot clouds of fog that take a few minutes to coalesce into a true atmosphere. There's also the differences between hazing a rehearsal and hazing with a full audience, as the article points out. Our bodies take in moisture and control humidity in their own way, and adding 150 or more bodies can greatly change the experience, with no clear metric for dealing with the different amounts of people. Once it's there, it's also hard to get rid of, and so it can be tough to get from a scene with lots of haze to a scene with no haze in a logical and clean way. Unfortunately, all the possible solutions are a bit foggy.
I don't think I've been to one Carnegie Mellon School of Drama show that does not have at least a little fog in the show or that prepares the audience for an amazing performance with a bucket-load of haze. I personally love when fog and haze is used in shows, concerts, and other productions because it hypes up the performance in a way. It highlights the lighting and amplifies the entire space. Of course fog/haze needs to be appropriately used if not it can be quite distracting when not necessary. Like Sam said, "fog has a mind of its own." It might be a bit of a lingering ghost and if not controlled correctly, the fog/haze could end up engulfing the room. But then there are times when a lot of fog all at once can be awesome. Music festivals do this a lot when the "beat drops". It hurts no one and it surprises the crowd. Gotta love SFX.
Fog is one of those things that I tend to underestimate as far as how difficult it will be the achieve the look you want. I feel like it's much more difficult medium than one would think, and this article is a testament to that. Even if you achieve the correct "saturation" and it's evenly spread around the stage, you still have to figure out how to make it disappear-- sometimes very quickly. Beyond the aesthetic issues, it's also unique in that it's one of the only factors that can affect the audience's physical comfort. Too much fog can not only affect how much of the action they can see, as mentioned in the article, but also their breathing to a small degree. The noise issue isn't one that I had really previously considered, but it does make sense that the more sophisticated and large the machines are, the more noise they would make when operating. Something interesting to think about is how fog effects the lighting design, and how the particles change the way the audience views the lights. As someone considering lighting design as a concentration, I'm sure this will be something I run into in the future.
The art of haze is certainly a tricky one to master. I remember watching the "Behind the Emerald Curtain" series on youtube about the backstage shenanigans happening at "Wicked", and haze was one of the things that stood out to me repeatedly when watching the series. Every single department had something to say about haze and fog, the management, the carpenters, the run crew, the actors, etc. It can be a massive undertaking. After just recently shadowing the stage management team at Wicked, I got to witness their preshow routine, which included taking and gathering measurements of the various air metrics; humidity (both on the stage and in the house), temperatures, house count which would equate to an increase in house temperature, etc. This was all for the sake of making sure that the haze and fog effects stayed on the stage and didn't pour into the audience, which they have down to a science.
I hate theatrical haze. I really don’t see what it adds to most theatrical scenes and artistic values. I understand when it is called for in stage directions or maybe the show really is a rock show like in School of Rock or something like that, but what lighting designers and directors don’t understand is that by changing the appearance and deliverance of the lights in a show completely changes the feeling of the play. It brings the audience out of the world of immersion when light beams are seen as beams as opposed to just blending and creating an atmosphere. Theatre is a delicate art of collaboration and immersion tactics for audiences to be able to enter the world of the play and really have a unique and telling experience. Theatre (unless otherwise specified) is not a rock show or any other such event akin to one. Theatre is an artform that audiences immerse themselves into.
This article is really interesting because it shows a lot of different real-life views of the struggles of using smoke. The hardest concern is how differently smoke will react with people in the house or not, because that no matter how much you practice, you wont know what will really happen until opening/ preview. What this article didn’t do was explain techniques or tricks for getting smoke to look how you want. I guess it really just goes down to trial and error until it looks how you want it and you just hope it can be relatively consistent. Basically this article is just a list of shows that need smoke for one reason or another and all the reasons why it was basically impossible to get it right. I don’t know how I feel about fog, I think a lot of times it’s more distracting than beautiful, especially in small theaters where you can start to taste the fog because there’s so much of it.
Smoke - as well as fog - is one of those strange, beautifully intangible elements of theatrical design which if done wrong will immediately eat up every bit of an audience's attention. Therefore, to do it right is to do it invisibly. I guess I've always known this instinctively, but before reading this article I had never considered all the practical nuances there could be to one show, one scene, or one moment's fog/smoke effects. Reading all the different perspectives on the subject gives a very insightful look into just how diverse the use of such effects can be, and how specific it is to every production which uses it. Its intangibility makes so much of what these designers do seem impossible to me, especially as someone who enjoys my end of theatre for its tangibility. Costumes can be counted, stored, washed, repaired, held. If it's not there, you know it. Fog - not so much. There is a similarity between acting/performance and fog which makes it far more difficult to recreate exactly every night and particularly dependent on extenuating circumstances. A designer who can work equally well in both worlds - the tangible and the immeasurable - is a true talent.
I think it’s so interesting how smoke/ fog/haze is utilized differently by different shows in order to produce unique effects. I personally have only used dry-ice in one show I did in high school (“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”) for the end of acts 1 and 2 when the car is flying to simulate clouds. It was a pretty simple effect that we still managed to get wrong some nights (for the last performance one of the machines had accidentally been left on too long and had burned a hole in itself, so we needed to use one machine in the middle as opposed to one each off both sides of stage). It’s hard to imagine how much care and detail that needs to go into how to achieve the correct effect for a larger- scale/ touring show, especially when dealing with something so literally ethereal and difficult to control by nature. I never even thought about it’s reaction being different when there is a different amount of people in the audience/ when the humidity is different, but there are definitely some aspects of a performance that a team cannot always manage all of the time. I think the balance between audience> actor visibility is also important to balance; even with our two small dry ice machines, I can remember a few times during the finale songs when the actors needed to fan through the fog to be seen. I think it’s incredible how fog can be used both to create romanticism and elegance while also creating the signature rock-concert vibe as well as a comedic effect. Since coming here I’ve noticed how haze is mostly used to exaggerate and accentuate the beams of light to make them even more impactful.
I haven’t worked with fog enough to have really formed an opinion on it. I know that there are some really amazing things that can be done with it but whenever its come up in my past experiences its always been a pain to work with for experiences that, while admittedly cool, also feel a bit gimmicky. That being said that’s just my personally experience of working with fog, I’ve seen it used in shows and look incredible, I just haven’t had the expectance myself yet. My experience with fog tend to be in the vain of things like the fog triggering somehow (turns out the someone put too much dry ice in the machine) and covering the stage with fog in the middle of intermission. Not necessarily a bad thing, if the fog is needed for the top of act 2, but there’s a bit more luck and chance involved with it that I would like.
As someone without much direct experience controlling (or attempting to control) fog and haze, I cannot speak much to that end of it. But there have been a variety of occasions where I have been backstage and people start having to wave their hands in front of their faces, and everyone kind of starts asking "What's that?" before there is the collective realization that there is a haze effect being produced on stage. It can make being and operating backstage not only weird and annoying, as in the aforementioned example, but also downright uncomfortable as the temperature fluctuations required can bring the backstage climate down to freezing levels. But when watching from the audience, all cannot help but be forgiven as the effects are startling for their simultaneous simplicity and breathtaking quality, especially when interacting with highly focused beams of light. Though I might not know how to wrangle it, I certainly have respect for the effect, and the necessary measures it takes to produce a successful haze effect.
I never really thought about how complicated working with fog can be. I have worked with it before, and knew it was hard to control, but I had never thought about there being different types and how its made all have different results. Even then, the article explains that the fog can still be unpredictable. I wonder how designers feel about this and why so many of then still choose to use fog in the shows. Reading this article, it was also really interesting to hear that fog can do things light carve out a space with light, create depth, or even simulate fire and explosions. All of the worries that the audience has seems pretty major to me. I think the one that is most fascinating in the fact that many audiences are easily infatuated with the fog and then get distracted from the actual action on stage. Overall, I never knew how complicated fog can be. There are several factors that go into having fog on stage and while it creates awesome and realistic results, it is an aspect that is hard to predict and even harder to control.
This article does a very nice job of summing up some of the different types of haze/fog effects, their differences and purposes, the way they help blend together the world of the play; essentially it’s another level of theatrical ‘magic’ that can help make the world more immersive. The operative word in that sentence is ‘can’, because haze can also do a lot to ruin a show. Depending on where you place your hazer, and what the airflow in the room looks like (something that can be inconsistent, unpredictable, and downright stupid to work with) you can either have a gorgeous blend of light through a wonderful medium that brings the show together, or you could have it look like there’s a fire off stage. But if you are able to master this quasi art quasi science component of theatre, you can be heavily rewarded. I say to those who would go and watch a musical and don’t appreciate theatrical haze, you should watch some of the production who use it right (even though it is not called for in the script), and then experience the same show without haze. It’s a tool that audiences might not know about or realize, and because of the dimension it can add to a space, it’s invaluable as a resource.
I have had endless struggles with stage smoke. It's unpredictability makes it hard to work with, and the machines themselves aren't always consistent or great. High schools, necessarily, have cheap smoke machines: ours was constantly crapping out on us at important moments in the show. In our production of The Princess Bride, we borrowed a "geyser" style machine that came with LED settings so that we could make the fire swamp as foggy and dramatic as we wanted. In the end, we had to drag it across the stage following the actors....disguised as a bush. Not a shining moment. But it is really surprising how difficult it is to control, and how often people actually get it right. The relatively controlled environment in the theatre helps a lot: working on a zombie movie on a rainy, windy night practically guarantees that the only perfect shot will have been the test take, when nobody was in costume and there were people drinking coffee in the corner of the shot. I have serious respect for the people who can make it work consistently and well.
Fog and haze are some of the coolest theatre special effects and they are definitely a challenge to get “right” for each production. They can also be pricey! I am a huge fan of low-lying for created from dry ice, but this effect normally requires a large amount of dry ice pellets. The nice thing is that with a dry-ice fogger, once you get the right amount you can achieve a steady flow of thick stage fog. Haze in different densities can also take a space from concert to cathedral, and evoke considerable emotion in the creation of a unique spectacle. I like how this article gave a good selection of examples of how these effects can be utilized for a huge variety of applications. In some cases, the haze is subtle, while in others, you want thick distracting smoke. Fog and haze are both tools that lighting designers and scenic designers can implement together, bridging their two design mediums.
Fog, haze, smoke, call it what you like, but it is one of the most difficult things I have had to deal with. I generally refer to all of it as fog, though that may be wrong. Having said that, the difficult part of it was not the mechanics, it was the people. I got a lot of complaints from a certain director for the varying looks of the fog from day to day. Despite my trying to inform her that it would look different everyday, she wouldn’t hear it. Everything influences how the fog looks – the pressure, the temperature, the humidity, the number of people in the audience. All of these things have an impact on how fog looks. Try as we might, it is difficult to control all the aspects in order to make the same look every time. If you can’t control everything, the fog has to change and that is equally as difficult on the fly. If you have the skills and equipment to do that – more power to you, but most of us don’t. In my case – I had no control over the HVAC in the venue, among other things. I would leave everyone who wants to use some type of fog, haze, snow or whatever in any given situation with this – how are you using it to tell the story?
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